


Alive in an Age of Idols

by NoChaser



Category: Queer as Folk (US)
Genre: Angst, M/M, Minor Character Death, Season/Series 05
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-15
Updated: 2013-11-17
Packaged: 2017-12-29 12:35:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1005529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NoChaser/pseuds/NoChaser
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the bombing of Babylon, Brian and Justin encounter someone who forces them to face their individual issues.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Brian faces his guilt and fears.

ALIVE IN AN AGE OF IDOLS*

   Everything was spinning. The room, hell, the _world_ around him was whirling like a dervish in the throes of some pious ecstasy.  He tried to hold on to something, steady himself – but there was no wall beside him, no foundation beneath. Just a fine film of ash and concrete dust whitening everything, turning to a thick gray muck where intermittent sprays of water mixed with it sporadically. Chunks of heavy plaster, many the size of a lunch box and one half the size of a piano, now decorated the smoke dimmed Plexiglas floor he’d danced on. Became a man on. Naked wiring hung loose from the ceiling in a disquietingly consistent pattern, looking for all the world like ghastly streamers at some ghostly prom.

   But, no, that was a different time. A different celebration. A different fucking disaster.

   The crunch of broken glass under foot accompanied his steps as the sound of his boot toe connecting with something halted him. Squatting down in the middle of the prism of glass shards littering what had been a Pergo pathway leading to the bar, he picked up a shoe. Brown. Serviceable.

   So damned painfully out of place. 

   “So, that’s where it went to.” The voice was deep and husky. – one too many cigarettes had obviously had a part in its making.

   Brian’s head jerked up at the unexpected intrusion. He blinked his eyes.

   Had to blink again.

   “Dusty?” His voice cracked.

   “I was looking for that shoe. Thanks, Brian,” she laughed a relieved laugh, taking the shoe from his hand.

   He drew in a deep breath. Held it. Let it out.

   Again.

   He closed his eyes and licked his lips. They tasted like aftermath. Acrid. Blood, smoke, chemicals. Like a bad hit of Anita’s acid.

   Shit. He was fucked up and he didn’t even remember getting there. Or here.

   “I thought you… They told me you were…” He was _looking_ at the woman. _Talking to_ _her_. But she was…

   “Dead? And… they were right. Can’t say I’m not upset about it, but…it is what it is.” She shrugged her shoulders resignedly as she leaned over and put on the shoe.  “Ahhh… Much better.”

   “Jesus,” he breathed. “I’ve fucking lost my mind.” He ran his hands over his face, settling the heels hard against his eyes. “You aren’t fucking real.” The words were whispered, more to himself than to the apparition.

   “C’mon, Brian. You _see_ me. I’m as real as all this.”

   “ _All this_ is a nightmare,” he shouted.  

   “Unfortunately it isn’t,” the husky voice replied. “No, unfortunately this is real.”

   Brian closed his eyes, hoping when he opened them again the world would have righted itself, Babylon would be whole again and all this ‘nightmare’ would be just that. He’d been wishing that on a continuous loop for the better part of two days now. As he pushed himself back up to his feet, he walked slowly toward the carnage of charred oak and twisted metal that had once served as a bar, all the while looking for the rabbit hole he knew he had to have fallen through. He wanted to laugh – cry – scream. Walking through a bombed and gutted Babylon was no more a possibility in his mind than talking to a dead woman. And yet… here he was. Doing both.

   “When I heard… I was going away, you know? Wasn’t important enough for me to be here. So I donated the place. My fucking wallet. No real investment for me. Pocket change. But they…” He laughed darkly. “…they invested their bodies and their futures and their fucking lives! And Mikey’s hurt and six people… died… and it could’ve been Jus...” Dusty heard the strain of tears in Brian’s voice as he stood staring at a single spot on the floor.

   “Michael’s gonna be okay, you know. Just like Justin’s gonna be okay. Just like my kids are…”

   “Oh, god,” he breathed out and wrapped his hands behind his head, rocking back and forth slowly. “Shit…your _kids_ , Dusty _…_ they’re…”

   “…gonna be okay. Eventually… they’ll be okay. Marie’s a good mother. She’ll be there every step of the way for them. And they’ll be there for her. It’s what love does.”

   “They shouldn’t have to deal with this at all!”

   “Yeah, well, I can’t disagree with you there. Collateral damage is never a tidy concept, Brian. But they have Marie and my parents. They have Lindsey and Mel and Gus… They have… you.”

   “Me?” Brian’s pained snort sounded harsh as it echoed against the battered and bleeding walls of the once great room. “Right. The bringer of bats and bombs and broken children everywhere.”

   “Is this where I’m supposed to prostrate myself at your feet? Supplicate to the Great God Kinney in his omnipotence? Seek understanding of why _you_ , the font of all pestilence, allowed such evils to walk among us? You think much too highly of yourself, Kinney.” Brian winced and a groan from the shifting stress of tortured metal along the east wall punctuated the words of the dead woman.

   “It was my fucking building that fell down around them, goddamnit! That crushed them, that…”

   “But _not_ your bomb, Brian! Or your _fault_! You’re not a god, Mr. Kinney… Not even a lesser one,” she whispered in his ear as she leaned in. “Shit happens. Sometimes gruesome shit.” She wiggled her foot, as if brushing off a bit of caked mud from that serviceable brown shoe. “But… if we’re smart… we listen – learn the lessons the shit contains.”

   “Well, shit sure schooled us _this_ time, didn’t it, Mother Dusty?” Brian slapped his open palm down hard on the burned wood of the bar top. “You hear that,” he demanded. “The sound of closet doors and caskets lids all over the greater Pittsburgh area slamming shut as we speak.”

   For a moment Dusty said nothing. What could she add to that? He was probably right.  So she just waited as their eyes traveled the rubble and debris that symbolized the hatred for who they were – of the anger and fear and ignorance that consigned her children to the care of a now bereaved single mother. “Believe me, Brian, I _know_ the sound of a casket lid closing,” she gently whispered.

   “Fuck, Dusty. I…”

   “…forgot I died?” She leaned back against a broken piece of wall and pulled her wrap more tightly around her shoulders as Brian huffed out a small, humorless laugh.

   “Yeah. This is a rather… unprecedented exchange for me.”

   An enigmatic little smile crossed the woman’s lips. “For me as well.”

   Brian sank to the floor, the leather of his jacket wicking away slivers from the splintered wood. His fingers traced lightly over a few suspiciously darkened spots on the broken floor as he tearfully wondered if _this_ was the spot where Mikey collapsed. Or if _that_ was where Justin stood as the blast… He drew in a deep, shuddering breath and closed his eyes against the moisture he knew was only a single thought away from escaping down his face. “I could have lost them all. I could have lost… _him_ … God! I thought I had!”

   “But you _didn’t_. They are _alive_ , Brian. Deb, Michael, Justin. Alive and full of second chances.”

   “And third and fourth and…” Brian breathed out, his voice now as broken as the room. “I saw him… held him as he was bleeding out… on a fucking filthy garage floor. He was so damned beautiful and… then… he was so fucking _still_. Couldn’t wash his blood off my hands… couldn’t even _breathe_ … until I knew he was going to live. Just waited… And I watched him night after night… in that goddamned pink shirt, walking out the door with a fucking _gun_ in his pocket!” Brian’s jaw quivered and the heels of his hands again dug into his eyes. His throat rattled as he tried to draw in air – air thick with the memories of bombs and bodies and smoke. He sniffed and wiped his face on his shirtsleeve. “You know, I’d just wait in the dark… wait for that inevitable phone call telling me he was… And now… Fuck! I’ve spent the last five fucking years waiting for him to live or… or…”    

   “Justin’s come of age in the middle of a battlefield. Earned his purple heart, for chrissake. He’s a soldier, Brian. He fights for what he wants – to be who he is with no shame, to love who he loves with no apology.” Dusty dragged her fingers through the wires hanging above her head. “Idealists always push their boundaries. They shame us into pushing ours. Or frighten us into hiding. Our choice.”

   “Cue the demagogues and the fascists and the goddamned Christian absolutists, wielding their rhetoric and their viciousness as if they were the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Idealism? Meet the bombs of Babylon!” Brian swung his arms out wide, encompassing the destruction that had once been his safe harbor. His proving ground.

   Dusty sank to the ground beside the wretched man, patting the dirty denim of his jeans. “Yet he lives to fight another battle. As do you. And my children. And your children.”

     _Life not worth living if one not take risk_. The thought that he’d actually _said_ that to Justin sickened him. Well, fuck his own bumbling bravado, his sarcastic naiveté. He was tired. Tired of fighting. Tired of waiting for Justin to die on him. Tired of waiting for life to give them just one goddamn moment of peace. “I’m too tired to watch him tilt at the windmills anymore.”

   “Bullshit.”

   “What the fuck do you know? You’re fucking dead.”

   “Which gives me a unique perspective, wouldn’t you think?” She smiled that frighteningly knowing little smile.

    “So, all that shit my mother fed me is true?” His eyebrows raised as he gave his companion a sideways glance. “The knowledge of all things heretofore hidden _is_ imbued upon departing this earthly plane?”

   “Only a little. More the lack of anything left to fear.” Dusty’s laugh became a sigh. “And the memories of all those opportunities I let pass because I was afraid to take them.”

   Brian chilled as he thought of his own missed opportunities, his own fears. How they just paled in comparison to _this_. “I… told him I love him. I was so damned scared I’d lost him again, that he’d died without ever hearing the words he wanted so fucking badly. So, I told him I love him. And, god help me, I do.” Brian scrubbed at his face in frustration. “But… all this… his damned certainty, idealism… my fucked up curse… It’s one disaster waiting to happen after another.”

   “It’s called life, Brian. Fucked up or sweet as honey. It’s simply life. No curse. You choose to be happy with the joys you’re offered – or not. But it’s _your_ _choice_. Not fate.” She stood, dusting off her shoes with one hand. “Justin’s life will continue on with or without you. So will yours with or without him… Just like life will go on after Babylon. You can choose to celebrate it or mourn it.”

    They sat in their own silence for a while, and Brian thought about the woman’s words. _My choice_.

   “Time for me to go now. Thanks again for the shoe.”

   Brian watched as Dusty walked away, across the broken bones of the place he once thought sacrosanct. His temple. He could see Justin dancing among the throngs of worshippers, his heart and soul fully laid bare in offering as his body thrummed with the determination of life, the possibilities of death. Could see the lights glint on that shining face, all full smile and orgasmic hunger. Knew the young man had more strength and grace and courage than his years should have allowed. He was a warrior – fighting intolerance and bigotry and rejection and Brian’s own demons. Even when Brian refused to fight them for himself.

   Justin had made his choices. Had chosen his path, made his mistakes. Lived with the fallout. With apologies and with regrets at times. He repeatedly risked it all for what he believed in, what he wanted. Pushed Brian to do the same. To take a chance…

   “Life not worth living if one not take risk,” the raspy voice offered in parting, that damned knowing smile in place.

   Brian answered the apparition with his own smile. His first genuine one in days. And he remembered Justin’s tearful smile when Brian had finally said those words. He wanted _that_ smile to shine on him again. And again. To not be afraid to let it.

   “Yeah. I heard that somewhere,” he said. He closed his eyes and watched Justin dance.     

 

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Justin faces his issues.

ALIVE IN AN AGE OF IDOLS* - Pt 2

   The lights from the streetlamps refracted slightly as they hit the minute pits and cracks in the glass of his large window. They spread out into tiny abstract prisms, bouncing waves of color off a few trapped raindrops. Justin stood there, studying the way the simple patterns played out.

   Only a few days ago this had been one of his favorite times of day, this after-dark-electric-light-show the city and the merchants and business owners put on, seemingly just for his pleasure. He would stand for hours looking out, gleaning inspiration for yet another painting, yet another canvas taken from bare to unabashed with a few strokes of his hand. A few hours of his life.

   Now, it seemed, the pits and cracks and sporadic rain droplets refracted less and less, the prisms shrinking the spectrum to grays and dull blues and any number of shades of black. The reds, the yellows and greens and purples that impregnated his passion and gave birth on canvas had been blown away. Literally. And, as he now stood at the large window in the rat-hole garret he’d moved into a few months ago, he could no longer see the imposing spine of Babylon, neon against the black of a city night.

   That had been one of the perks of living this alien life of independence – that he’d been able to look out this window, stand on tip-toe, crane his neck slightly to the right and, squinting, see the proof of his coming of age. He had met Brian in front of it, captured Brian in the midst of its thumping beat, and left Brian standing alone in its bowels as he walked away. And now, beside its battered carcass, he’d heard ‘the words’ from Brian, however punctuated by the smell of death and the faint heartbeat of survival.

   He should have been elated, thrilled beyond belief that the man had finally said ‘it’. God, how he’d once needed those words. Now it just felt so selfishly insignificant a need. Michael lay in a hospital bed, critically injured. So many had been injured, maimed… killed. He just couldn’t find much joy in this dream fulfilled, not like he’d expected.

   Maybe he was growing up.

   Or maybe he was growing cynical.

   Maybe they were the same thing.

   He leaned his head against the cooling glass and inhaled deeply from his Marlboro. He’d given them up, again, until this bitch of a week. Unconsciously he raised himself up on his toes and craned his neck and squinted out the window.

   “Ahh...the lights have been dimmed on Broadway, and the play has e’er moved on.”

   Justin sputtered out a cough from the cigarette smoke and jerked his head up at the unexpected words. His first thought was that he’d left his door unlocked again, and it was Mrs. Tittelman from across the hall. But the tenor and volume was entirely wrong. There was no timidity, no plaintiveness. This voice was strong and raspy and certain. And the words were posthumously apt.

   When Justin turned, his heartbeat stopped, then sped up as adrenaline pumped. _What the fuck_? His startled brain struggled to place this image inside the reality. “Dusty?”

   The woman laughed, a low and throaty sound. “In the flesh… Or not, if you will.”

   Justin’s jaw was dropped, his eyes wide, darting to his hands, his canvas, the ceiling. He let out a little huffed snort as his look finally settled on this… woman… standing right in front of him. “Dusty?” The question was no less incredulous the second time.

   “Justin,” Dusty said with a slight nod, pulling off her wrap and laying it across the plywood plank that masqueraded as a table. She looked over at the canvas propped up on the easel that sat next to the makeshift dining space. It was black. Entirely. “A little mood art?”

   “Everyone thinks you’re _dead_ , Dusty.” Surely the woman had to know this.

   “I know.” She settled herself on one of the two plastic chairs in the stark room. “Everyone would be correct.”

   “Holy shit.” Justin leaned his head back against the window he’d been remembering through just a few moments ago. Or maybe that was a lifetime ago. He closed his eyes, reminded himself to _just breathe_ , and focused on getting his gimp hand to stop that fucking tremor. It always shook more when he was stressed.

   “Your point is noted,” Dusty said with a quick chuckle.

   He could feel the sill of the window behind his butt cheeks and leaned into it. Not much of a ledge for sitting, but a ledge nonetheless, and in the back of his mind he wondered if he had unwittingly tossed himself off of one somewhere. Or if he’d hit his head again on something in the blast and was in another coma – or perhaps the original one and he’d never woken up. Must be that. Yeah, he laughed out, a bit hysterically, and ran his hands over his tired face. _That_ was it. He never woke up. Could explain the aggravating improbabilities that constituted his last four years’ worth of memories. Comic books, Ethan, vigilantes, LA, PIFA, Stockwell, cancer, syphilis, bombs, talking to dead women…

   And Brian. Always Brian.

   Yeah, made more sense than it being his real life. He just never woke up.

   He pulled his hands from his face and looked at the image in front of him and it felt so wrong and strange and otherworldly. He laughed, again a bit hysterically, at that last thought, and merely asked, “Um… could I get you a cup of tea?”

   Dusty laughed heartily, and the sound filled the room. “ _You_ are a unique man, Justin. But no. No tea, thank you.”

   “Unique,” he repeated. “No… Just… confused.”

   “Understandable, but still… quite unique,” Dusty reiterated. She pointed to the black canvas that stood partially between them. “Tell me about this.”

   Justin let the Marlboro drop to the floor as he walked over and covered the dark painting. He didn’t even want a dead woman to share this. “It’s… how I feel.”

   “Dark? Empty?”

   “Too _full_ ,” he snapped. Surely even she could feel that oppressive presence of _everything_. “If I felt empty it would still be white.”

   “Purging through paint. Brian could market that concept.”

   Justin slowly raised one brow and tuned to make himself that tea. God knew he needed something. “Well, he does claim that everything is about sex or… death,” Justin retorted, his voice sounding more haunted than the room. “This would definitely fit at least one of those criteria.”

   Dusty sat back onto the chair, moving with much more grace than would be expected from a woman her size. Justin thought it was probably the being dead thing. She flipped off one shoe and idly rubbed her bare toes across the other foot. “No wonder I keep losing these things.”

   “Um… what?”

   “My shoes. Lost one that night.” There was really no need to clarify _which_ night. “Brian found it for me yesterday.”

   “Brian… found it? For you?” Justin screwed his eyes together. _Jesus_ , he thought, _I’m in the fucking Twilight Zone_.

   “No, he didn’t actually find it for me. But he was there, I was there, he was holding my shoe…” She shrugged a shoulder.

   “At Babylon? You talked with Brian at Babylon _yesterday_? Jesus Christ…”

   “It’s where we both needed to be. To understand.”

   Justin turned around and stared again at the forever diminished skyline, feeling a creeping clarification of an earlier moment… of what Brian had done. And it began to make sense.

   “Oh, god… That’s why he came here. Why he…” Justin didn’t finish that thought aloud.

   Christ.

   Brian had come here. Today. Hat in hand. Almost on bended fucking knee… and proposed. And Justin had blown him off. Dismissed it as some belated reaction to Michael’s injuries, the bomb… It was just so fucking un-Brian-like. The words, the proposal…

   Dusty could hear the questions on the young man’s face. One of the side effects of her condition, she supposed. “His being here startled you?”

   “Um, yeah. He…was here today. He seemed… not himself. He asked…” No, he didn’t really want to share that. Not here. Not now. “He seemed confused.”

   “I don’t think that’s at all odd, given the circumstances… Do you?”

   “Of course not, but this… It was more than that. Us…”

   “Well, Brian’s lived the last five years confused, Justin. Nothing in his reality meshed with what he encountered when he met you. Nothing prepared him for _you_.” She smiled. “That harsh, stoic world he fashioned around himself imploded. But, survivor that he is, he fought it. And now? Let’s just say that a great many truths can be revealed when one’s world has suddenly _ex_ ploded.” She joined Justin looking out into the dark. “Maybe he’s done with fighting it.”

   Justin shivered slightly as he imagined Brian standing isolate among the ruins of Babylon. It had been Brian’s school, his home, his sacred ground. That theater of the bizarre, where a myth grew into reality and the man behind it fell into obscurity. He could imagine him standing desolate, unprotected as the raw devastation uncoiled in his gut. He had seen him this morning, looking every inch the myth. Yet, the words had been anomalous – they didn’t fit the package. He said all Justin had wanted to hear. Before. Now, it seemed wrong.

   Justin shook his head, himself now confused. “Brian’s always been a complex man,” he said, “with complex complexes.”

   “And you’re simple?” Dusty’s lips curled up slightly. He could tell she was mocking him, just a little. And it pissed him off, just a little. He didn’t miss the irony of standing between a snarkily observant dead woman and the evidence of her place of death. He wondered if that not waking up from the coma thing merited further consideration.

   “Simple enough,” he finally replied. “At least I don’t expend my limited supply of emotional energy complicating my complexes.”

   “Don’t you?”

   Justin paused, staring at this… this chimera beside him. Did she really think he did that? Compound his issues rather than face them honestly? That was Brian’s modus operandi, not his. Shoving his issues aside, stuffing them down, ignoring them. Letting them fester and ferment until they rose to a whole other level of complexity.

   Yet, as he watched this woman watching him, he couldn’t deny that she was right. He’d stuffed and sublimated so much emotional baggage throughout the past few years. He’d never honestly dealt with his bashing, with how that affected every aspect of his life. He’d danced around his own needs and wants, torturing himself into a parody of Justin Taylor, hoping that Brian would just fucking love him now. He’d been as dishonest in his emotional self-dealings as Brian had been. And right now, he still didn’t know if either one of them could be redeemed. Christ…

   But he nodded once and walked to the canvas he had covered earlier, removing the drape to expose the monochromatic work to the harsh glow of the overhead light.

   “You asked me to tell you about this,” he said with a resigned sigh. “I told Brian earlier that this was my proof, my response, of sorts, to the hatred. As long as I kept creating something – anything – they haven’t won.” He ran his hand across the now dried bristles of a paintbrush, idly picking it up and then replacing it in its spot. “But this is really… these are _my_ complex complexes… all out here to inspect and analyze, to accept or refuse. Brian keeps his locked inside. I lock mine onto canvas.”

   He moved his hand across one corner.

   “This paint ridge here? Here, he told me he loves me. That night. I’d waited years to hear him say those three fucking words to _me_. But this, this is how selfish I now feel for wanting them, and how angry for _hearing_ them… People died – _you_ had to die – so I could hear him _say_ it. And I still don’t know if ‘I love you’ uttered in the aftermath of a bomb, romantic as it may seem, is enough anymore. What about ‘I respect you’ and ‘I want you to share my history with me’ and… What about just letting me _in_? I _know_ he loves me, I’ve always known he loves me. He just won’t live it.

   “Yes, I wanted the words, but not because they were wrenched out of him by his fear and guilt.”

   Dusty pointed toward a particularly lush swirl of texture in the lower left corner of the canvas. “What is this?”

   “I was so pissed off at Brian because he was going to Sydney,” Justin said after a long silence, focused on the spot Dusty had asked about. “Though I never told him that… I just kept thinking that he should have _been_ there, should have stopped acting like such an unqualified hedonistic prick.” He paused, then chuckled as he turned toward Dusty. The ghost of Dusty. “I kept rehearsing how I was going to passively/aggressively ignore the fucker when he came home. But… then… when the bomb…” Justin closed his eyes and swallowed hard. “Then, I was so relieved he _wasn’t_ there… That was the only thing I could think about, the only thing that let me get up again, to breathe… ‘ _He’s alive_.’”

   Dusty gave a wry smile. “There is something in that, isn’t there?”

   “Yeah, I guess there is.”

   They continued to analyze the black eddies of paint, the peaks and valleys of a painful landscape transferred from Justin’s soul onto the stretched fabric. Justin pointed to the spot that held his fear of dying – and his fear of remaining alive. The one that represented his anger at Brian for putting his health and life continually at risk through a determined adherence to some convoluted ideal of gay purity and a contrived fear of all things heteronormative. The spot that reflected Justin’s own doubts about ever being enough and his refusal to have his future veiled by the shadows of a thousand tricks.

   Dusty stood silent for several minutes, seeking something in the anger and pain Justin had revealed. She noticed an almost infinitesimal spot, just left of center. A tiny pinpoint of brightness.  “This isn’t a work wrenched out of you by the bombing.” It wasn’t a question.

   “No.” The word was nearly a whisper but she heard every ounce of heartache behind it.

   “Justin… Don’t think his revelations aren’t every bit as transformative as yours. He struggles and labors over his fears and doubts, too. His canvas is simply less obvious.”

   “I know. I just… I don’t know if I can be what he wants, Dusty. What he needs. If he can be that for me. I’m… tired.” He turned to look at the painting one more time, holding the drape in his hand, intending to cover it.

   Dusty pulled her stray shoe back on and picked up her shoulder wrap. As she settled it on her shoulders, she nodded toward Justin’s right hand. “It took time to regain your abilities. Hard work even when you were exhausted?”

   Justin rubbed the large muscle at the base of his thumb and nodded. “And it will never be perfect again.”

   Dusty gave a wan smile. “Will anything?”

   “No… No, I suppose not.”

   “But even with the limitations, you have the ability to produce something so meaningful… Something so beautifully imperfect.” Justin followed her gaze to the small bright spot near the center of the canvas. “He doesn’t have your brand of courage, Justin, your idealism. Few do, actually. But, given time…?”

   Justin sighed. He stared at that small spot he had left on the canvas. In that minute empty space he had archived memories of streetlamps and shower tiles, blood stained scarves and computer software, tuition payments and ‘later’… Yes, he knew Brian loved him. And he loved Brian. But, god, he was so tired. “How much more time am I supposed to give it?”

   She leaned to whisper. “As much as you both need.”

   Justin nodded, again. His hand reached for the small trowel lying on the plywood beside his easel and he raised it to the one small spot of perfect imperfection in the midst of all that calculated black. With an almost imperceptible flick of the blade, he widened it.

_As much as we both need_ , he thought.

   Okay.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Title adapted from a Camille Paglia quote regarding Babylon.


	3. Alive in an Age of Idols - Part 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brian and Justin talk at Babylon.

There hadn't been a single moment during the past two days when he hadn't thought about her. The apparition, the ghost. The dead lesbian. He felt, in turns, like she'd empowered him or rendered him useless. Like she'd given him the need for something more... but left him as something less. He hated that dichotomy. That one thing, in itself, was enough to make him feel his vulnerability. A quality he didn't embrace easily. Vulnerability led to death. The body. Mind. Spirit. And, god knows, both he and Justin had already died way too many times in their lives. But she wouldn't leave him alone. She was in his head now, her words and meanings running themselves around and around like a fucking tenacious mosquito. They'd buzzed and lit on him, ever-present until they started to overdub his own soundtrack. He'd only met that kind of tenacity once before. That stalking that made him notice. Made him hear. Made him want to bare his neck and scream “just fucking bite me already.” And maybe made him want to risk the potential for dying one more time.

It had been Carl who'd finally run him off. Found him sitting, soaked, in a puddle some random fire hose had deposited on the far corner of the former dance floor. Dressed him down for crossing the police tape and 'disturbing the scene', as if he'd crashed some macabre S&M party. 

“Go home, Brian. You look like hell.” 

And he did. 

By the time he'd returned to the loft, he'd already missed two calls from Cynthia and a whole night's sleep. He deleted the calls and ignored the bed and walked into the shower, hoping it would clear the buzz in his head. But, try as he might, ghost words and brown shoes and fucking fearless blond boys couldn't be shut up or washed away with hot water and shampoo. He tried to pretend this felt the same as when he'd re-tripped on some of Anita's bad shit. Tried to pretend that all the water running down his face was from the shower. To pretend he wasn't just pretending. 

Brian had dressed each of those two days and headed back to the hospital, searching out the most familiar thing he knew. That connection with Michael. But he'd found it as fractured as the man's body, a string of potholes they'd dug for themselves long before the bombing and which couldn't easily be filled with the ashes of a burned out playground. He stood back, engulfed in the disconnect he felt as Ben held Michael's hand and Deb wiped a lock of hair from his friend's tired face. And he wanted with every fucking fiber of his being to be in that circle. But he wasn't anymore. He was once again that scared little kid, standing on the outside of a candy store with his nose pressed hard up against the glass, his pockets empty, craving all the forbidden flavors on the other side. 

Maybe he, really, always had been standing there. 

In the end he'd had no conscious intention of ending up where he did. He'd actually been on his way to the office. But there he was standing on a fourth floor landing reeking of cat urine and littered with last week's Domino delivery. Knocking on a scarred up brown door. He'd lost Brian fucking Kinney somewhere between the haunted remains of Babylon and Room 344 of Allegheny General. He had no idea who this man was who was occupying his space. This vaguely familiar self, spurred on by an ineffable need born beneath a random lamppost, decked out in strangling white silk and frightened all to hell by garish gun-metal pink. He didn't know this stranger who'd proposed, who'd been shot down. Who'd walked away, a composite of hurt and relief. Who inexplicably wanted to listen to the buzzing mosquitoes and ask again and again – to maybe finally taste the candy on the other side of that fucking window. 

So now, two days later, he could still feel the chill of glass pressed hard against his nose. Feel the dichotomy and the vulnerability. Feel the desire to tilt at just one more fucking windmill. To risk it. 

:: 

Justin took a step back from the canvas that dominated the small room. His certainty of the pure black had wavered with his trip to the Twilight Zone. He flicked and scraped with that artist's knife, chipped away at the layers of hurt and anger, hoping to be rewarded with some enlightening white. He'd ended up with gray. Lots of gray. Immutable stains of his own complex complexes. There was pain inextricably intermingled with the pleasure. Tricks tossed in with tenderness. Harsh denials battling with the balance of soothing words after a nightmare. They were all parts of a whole and the whole was fucking gray. He was surprised at the naked honesty of the color. An honesty he still hadn't been able to fully accept.

Gray. Real. Beautifully imperfect.

“You've changed the feel of it.” 

He hadn't heard the groan of the old door as it opened. “Shit.” He really needed to remember that locks were there for a reason. “What makes you think it's the same one?”

Brian walked closer, running a finger down the edge of the stretched fabric. “This new subtlety doesn't disguise the turmoil.” 

“Yeah, well... seems turmoil's the thing these days.” Justin reached over, grabbed the spattered drape and covered the painting. He took a deep breath to calm his nerves. It was... awkward... having Brian near. “You see Michael?” 

“Yeah. Just came from the hospital.”

“How is he?”

“Healing.” Brian shrugged. “Distant.” 

“He's been through a lot. And you'll fix things between you two, Brian. The one thing that's never been in question since I first hit Liberty is the Brian and Michael reciprocal need quotient. You two are like a hydrogen atom.” 

Brian smiled and tilted his head and paused for an eternal moment. “Yeah, well, we all know what happens when you introduce a little external heat into that situation, Sunshine.” He took a smoldering Marlboro from Justin's ashtray, inhaled deeply and blew the smoke toward the ceiling. “Boom.”

Justin studied Brian. Impeccably dressed, of course. Hair impeccably in disarray. Posture impeccably straight. But the eyes were dark, haunted. Telling. The barbed sarcasm always gave so much more away than Brian could ever imagine. Boom. Their lives and Babylon. One fell swoop. 

He'd not seen or heard from the man since the day he proposed. Since the day Justin started to understand he was possibly just as fucked up as Brian. Two fucked up men, so sure they knew what was right for the other one, but who couldn't face their own shit. The shit that filled up the space between them. That seven or eight inches that might as well have been a universe. A universe full of shit neither had learned to swim through. 

Brian suddenly pulled Justin's old, white jacket from the back of the plastic chair and tossed it to him. “Come on.”

“Brian, I was in the middle of a piece...”

“Just put on the damn jacket and come on, Justin!” Brian dropped his hands to his sides and leaned his head back. Let the mask slip for a moment. “I... need you to do this with me.”

Justin hesitated, then pulled the jacket on one arm and nodded slowly. “Okay. Okay. Fine.” 

::

He was concerned about Brian's mental state. They'd left the apartment over half an hour ago, walking, halting, continuing on. Brian paused at times, cocking his head as if listening to some remembered conversation. Smile. Frown. Nod. Move on. In front of Torso, Woody's, the gym... And he hadn't spoken a single word. Now he stood staring, unblinking, at the window of the diner. Justin touched his arm. “Brian?”

“I was fifteen... almost sixteen the first time I stepped foot on Liberty Avenue,” Brian finally began, nodding his head toward the wide glass pane. “I'd met Mikey a year, year and a half earlier. I'd been to his house, couldn't get away from him at school... but I'd never been in the diner. That... that was his.” He turned briefly toward Justin, shrugged his shoulders and tightened his coat. “God, this place was a tapestry right off the fucking Yellow Brick Road then. Clubs and bars on every corner. Porn shops and sex shops woven in between bookstore and head shops... And beautiful fucking men everywhere you turned.” Brian barked out a little laugh. “And I was scared shitless of every bit of it.”

“I vaguely remember the feeling.” Justin smiled, still unsure of Brian. “It's terrifying for a kid.” 

Brian started to walk again. Slowly. “Now, you see? There's a flaw in your unstated premise, Sunshine. One of us has never been a kid.” He turned and walked backwards, arms out wide. A look of bemusement on his face. “I learned how to take a right hook at the ripe old age of six. How to put my drunken mother to bed and get myself off to school by the time I was eight. How to fuck by the time I was fourteen.” He stopped and ran one finger down Justin's cheek. “I had to grow up and be a man long before I had any fucking idea what being a man really meant... Did the best I could, but I think... I think I missed a couple of damned important developmental steps.” 

“Maybe,” Justin said. “Maybe you did, and, god... god, I hope they rot in hell for what they did to you, but... you're still the best man I know.” And he was. Justin thought... knew... that if asked to lay his life on the line, he'd want to do it for his mom, for his sister. Even for Gus. He'd want to. But when it came to Brian? There would be no thought, no want, no by-your-leave... he'd simply, willingly, forfeit his own life for Brian in half the space of a heartbeat. Because he was ultimately the best man Justin knew. Because he loved him enough to die for him. 

But dying for him and living with him were entirely different matters.

Brian had stopped walking, his arms still out by his sides. And he laughed. Full on and loudly. If it had been any other place, any other time, Justin might have thought it the most beautiful of rare things. 

“Then take this piece of advice, Sunshine,” Brian said when he finally caught his breath, “and widen your circle of friends.” 

::

He'd known. As he walked out the door with Brian, he'd known they'd end up here. Where else would they go? 

It shook him to his core. It was the first time he'd been here since that night, and he stood looking at the cracked walls and the broken floor where they'd all fucked and danced. Where he and Brian made ridiculous rules and fatal mistakes. Babylon was gutted and crippled. Justin thought it looked a lot like them, these pieces of their history, now lame and splayed out in this hollow room. There was something so incredibly sad about the correlation, yet so undeniably appropriate. 

He stood awed at the loss. Justin wanted to weep for this cathedral, the place of his own manhood's awakening. This mecca that offered him sanctuary. That now lay bombed out and wasted, a mere casualty in a war of ideologies that would most likely never claim a victor. The rational thing, he had no doubt, would be to administer the sacrament, pass the censor, recite the litany, bury it and move on. Yet he'd stood on his toes, craned his neck and squinted out that window, hoping, needing to feel that heartbeat once more. And hope and need rarely led to rational thinking. He knew he wanted it to live, that he would always be drawn back here, right here, just as he would always be drawn back...

Jesus, he was so fucked up. 

Brian ran his hands across the links of chain that had separated the public from the less public, the raunch from pure decadence. He brushed debris from the sofa in one corner and sat down, lighting a joint pulled from his pocket. 

“You sure you should light that in here?”

“Jesus, Justin,” Brian said, drawing in a lungful of the sweet smoke. “Give yourself a break. You don't always have to be the ethics director.” He watched long strings of smoke curl upward. “Besides, they've shut off the gas... No more explosions.”

An uncomfortably honest silence settled in after Brian spoke. He had a flicker of doubt about the wisdom of being here, with Justin. The place was filled with ghosts – the kind that weren't interactive – and it was impossible to ignore the current condition of their own non-relationship in the middle of all the memories. He'd become in this place. They had become in this place. It had always been a place infused with a life-bearing energy and acceptance. Now it reeked of hatred and death. 

“You going to rebuild it, Brian? Babylon?” He stole the joint and pulled in a lungful of its sweetness. “It's who we are. Who you are.”

Brian ran his hands through the dust on the back of the sofa. “Yeah, well, be that as it may, I have it on good authority that time will continue it's inevitable march forward with or without Babylon.” He closed his eyes, thinking of a beautiful boy pole dancing, of making rules, of fucking Rage. “Maybe it's simply time. Maybe it's served its purpose.”

“Served its purpose? You really think it's time to turn it into the latest installment of Big-Box-Stores-R-Us?” 

“Well, I'd prefer, perhaps, Hugo Boss. Let the petit bourgeois have somewhere less... pedestrian... to clerk.”

Justin smiled. “Elitist.”

“They can raze my temples, Sunshine, but they can never kill my queer soul.” Brian drew in another lungful of calm. He shuddered at his own words, but he was an adman through and through. It was indeed, all about sex and death. And sometimes... sometimes they were inextricable realities. 

Brian glanced toward Justin. He'd meant the comment to be bitingly ironic, but he saw how it affected the boy. He'd closed his eyes and twisted up his features. Perhaps, Brian thought, against the evidence of just how the temple had been razed. At how closely he'd approached the death of his own queer soul. And queer body. 

But Justin had heard something... different. 

“Thank god. If you'd...”

Brian quirked his brow when Justin hesitated. “If I had...?”

Justin stood and walked toward what had once been a wall – a wall where he'd been on his knees in front of Brian too many times to count. Intimacies that now seemed so distant, as if they belonged in someone else's life. And he needed the distance right now. Why, he mused, did it seem so much easier to lay his pain out in front of a dead woman than with the man he'd shared his body and his heart with? Suddenly he longed to be back in his squalid little garret, alone with his canvases and his complexities, scraping away the obsidian he'd glommed onto fabric. Seeking an honesty of minutia in gray. Pain was so much easier to deal with in the abstract. 

“If I had what?” 

“You weren't here.” There was a pain in Justin's lungs and he coughed, not sure if it was the dust they were stirring up or the memory. “You weren't here,” he repeated. It was a raspy, desperate sound. 

“Justin, I wish I...” 

“I was so fucking angry at you for that, Brian. So goddamned hurt that what was important to me was so inconsequential to you. That you could give endlessly from your bank account on this but not from your 'queer soul', as you so aptly called it.” He pulled in a deep breath that did little to ease the burn in his chest. “Even if we weren't... even though we weren't together, I was angry. But the cause was important. So I smiled and I laughed and I made nice with everyone. And I drank. And I got more angry.” 

“Justin.” 

“And then the whole fucking world exploded and all I could think about was you. He isn't here. And I'd never been so glad for your stubborn, narcissistic, hedonistic queer soul in my life. You... weren't here.” His voice broke and his shoulders shook and he wanted so damned much to just bawl like he did when he was five. Or seventeen. But that seemed too little and too much. 

“I don't think there was ever a time I was as scared,” Brian said after a long silence. “When I was in that car and I heard about the club... heard people died, that people were hurt, I was fucking sick that it could be you and that it should have been me and I...”

“Don't you ever fucking say something like that again! You fucking hear me, you goddamned prick?” Justin had spun around and brought the full force of his hand against Brian's face. “You don't ever get to say something like that. Ever. Not here. Not to me!” The tears had finally broken loose and were running down Justin's face. Brian sat in shock, his own hand covering the stinging skin of his left cheek. 

“Jesus Christ, Justin. Did you think I didn't fucking care? That I wouldn't trade my fucked up life for yours, for chrissakes?” Brian reached out and pulled Justin to him. He couldn't tell whose body was shaking harder. He only knew he had to touch Justin. Feel him. Remind himself that they were both alive.

“I don't want your life, Brian. I don't want your life.” Justin whispered the phrase again and again into Brian's shoulder. It seemed important for him to make Brian understand... He pulled Brian's head to his and kissed him violently. Painfully. He wanted them to hurt. To feel. “I need to feel you. God, Brian...”

Violence and anger and pain pulsed between them as their fingers tore at clothing and dug into the other's skin. There was nothing gentle about this. This was as primal and carnal as anything either of them had ever felt, as bare and raw as the ruins they rutted in. “Jesus, fuck!” Justin cried out as he felt Brian thrust into him unprepared. He could taste the coppery tingle in his mouth from a cut lip, could feel the pain in his ass and knew he was at least rubbed raw, if not torn. Brian felt the sharp dig of fingernails in his back and it made him thrust harder, kiss harder, ride harder. This wasn't about making love or fucking or about sex at all. This was about feeling. Anything. 

Justin grabbed a handful of brown hair and clenched it tightly as his body began to tense. His eyes flew open and his mouth flew open, prepared for a cry that never sounded as he came, his body shuddering reflexively against Brian. Brian struggled to focus on Justin, on his eyes. To watch him as he hit that point of no return – that moment when Justin knew his heart would surely stop and his body would certainly ignite. That moment when whatever bit of lucidity he'd managed to cling to abandoned him. Brian had seen it a thousand and more times, that second of stunned surprise that would settle in Justin's eyes as his orgasm overtook him, as if it was a mystery that it overtook him at all. That look that always sent Brian into his own spiraling free fall.

Neither man moved. Their breathing had long since evened itself out but their emotions were still a mess. Brian slowly shifted, releasing Justin from beneath him, a bit ashamed at his complete devolution into some base cretin. He grimaced when Justin winced, his skin pulling from the leather of the debris strewn sofa. 

“You okay?”

Justin winced again as he sat up, checking himself for any obvious signs of tearing. “No. But I will be.” He reached over and collected their clothing. Brian's shirt was torn and his own was little better. “What the hell were we doing, Brian?”

Brian sighed loudly and shrugged. “I don't know. But what better place to explore our baser instincts than the rubble of Babylon's backroom?” 

“Explore our baser instincts.” Justin laughed sadly as he zipped his jeans. “I don't know about you, Brian, but that went way beyond my 'baser instincts' just now.” He walked back through the chain curtain, marveling that it was the one part of Babylon that seemed to be intact. Somewhere in the back of his mind that seemed an important fact. He stored it there, with a host of other seemingly important things he couldn't make sense of right now. 

Like his mixed up feelings about Brian. 

Justin loved the man with ever ounce of his being. With every fucking thing he had. Had since he was seventeen. He would die for him and couldn't bear the thought of him being hurt. If nothing else, his reaction to Brian's comment in the backroom told Justin that. But he couldn't let go of what Brian had said earlier. I think I missed a couple of damned important developmental steps. He remembered something he read at Lindsay's one night when he was babysitting. Children learn in stages. If they never learn to crawl, if they go straight to cruising or walking, they've missed a crucial developmental stage. Brian had been forced into skipping some of his emotional growth stages, thanks to the assholes who called themselves his parents, and he paid for those missed opportunities. 

But, Justin wondered, hadn't he, himself, also missed a stage or two in his life? Maybe not as crucial, but one's he would pay for down the line? Maybe already was paying for? He'd pretty much gone from senior English classes to public sex in bath houses and backrooms, for fuck's sake. From never even having a date to foursomes and watching his lover fuck everything that had a Y chromosome. He'd gone from the false surety of his own family to living with Brian, to living with Deb, with Lindsay, with Daphne, with Deb, with Brian... Christ. He'd been bashed and hated and kicked out of college and watched his lover battle cancer and had sex with more men than he could count before he'd ever had his own apartment. 

Dusty was right. He was as fucked up as Brian. He just dealt with it in a less caustic manner. 

And here he stood. At the epicenter of what his life had become the night he met Brian. An acolyte in the holy church of the public fuck, a temple built to sanctify the inherent rights of gay men everywhere and he was in love with the fucking high priest. He didn't begrudge it. Wasn't ashamed of any of it. And most of it he wouldn't change if given the chance. But maybe he'd been wrong when he encouraged Brian to rebuild. Maybe they did need to move beyond it, quit letting it harbor them and feed their false sense of security. Quit giving it the power to define who they were. He alternately loved and hated who this place had helped Brian become. And he knew instinctively that it would take more than any bomb for that act of creation to be undone.

Brian watched as Justin wandered the battered room, knew he was processing something heavier than either one of them might want to deal with in this place. He could still feel the thrum of the music that had pulsed through this room like a heartbeat night after night, year after year. Could still feel the hands on him, the whispered invitations, the taught skin against his own. Could smell the sweet and musky masculine scent that filled the air when they danced. Could see Mikey laughing, high on something, his forehead pressed against his own. Justin, possessed by the music, head thrown back and body writhing sensuously. Then... Mikey bleeding, his body ripped through by the shrapnel of bigotry. Have you seen Justin? The panic and the abject emptiness he felt in that moment. 

“It was right here,” Justin announced suddenly. He was running his hands up and down the jagged metal of the catwalk stairs. “Right here where you told me we wouldn't be walking down the aisle in matching Vera Wang's.” 

His rhetoric? 

His bullshit, fucking iconic, separationist dogma. Phrases he'd crafted to enforce that barrier between himself and any vestige of mediocrity. And he'd believed every word of it. Still did, for the most part. But he'd do anything to never feel that fear again. Ever. 

“When you told me you loved me, it should have been the fucking best day of my life. I'd waited almost five years to hear it. But it wasn't, and I'm sorry that it wasn't.” He smiled slightly. “I know panic, Brian. I'm intimately familiar with it. And that... that was panic.”

“I meant it, Justin. I've meant it for a long time, but I couldn't...”

“I know. I've always known it. Mostly. And I waited. For you to grow up and realize it yourself.” Justin wrapped his arms around Brian. Held him tightly and hated the hurt they'd both gone through. “But this time... this time I'm not sure I'm grown up enough.”

“You're the adult in this relationship, Sunshine. Always have been,” Brian whispered. He'd done this to himself, put himself right here. So fucking many times Justin had all but begged him for some admission. Anything. And he'd let every one of them pass with a sarcastic quip or a tired retread of his goddamned litany. 

“You're not the only one who missed some growing stages, you know. For the first time in my life I'm living on my own. You never learned how to be a kid? I never learned how to really be an adult. I think maybe it's time we both worked on those issues, don't you?” Raising up on his toes, Justin pressed his lips lightly against Brian's. Just held them there for a moment. “We don't have to be anyone's version of queer. We're not some kind of cold, immutable idols who can never change or make mistakes. It doesn't have to be black or white or perfect. Imperfect can be beautiful, too. I guess that means we're both pretty fucking beautiful.” He laughed. “But... we're alive and I love you. And, chances are, we'll fuck it up again.” 

Brian laughed with Justin, although he really wanted to cry. He wasn't sure if this was a beginning or an end, and hated the uncertainty. But their timing had always been for shit. He kissed the top of Justin's head and walked away, into the center of the once great room. His life. His past. His home. 

Justin watched Brian survey his sanctuary one more time. Give one last, longing glance at the familiar rituals he'd presided over against hallowed walls, in darkened corners. Melancholy colored Brian's skin, then regret, then resignation. Lavender. Blue. Gray. Justin knew he hadn't said what Brian wanted to hear, that everything was good and Vera Wangs were in their future. But it wasn't time, for either of them. 

Justin also knew Brian was saying goodbye to this part of himself. Preparing to walk away from a place that raised him up above a life too turbulent for a broken boy to walk through. A life that gave him wings, let him fly above mere mortals, until, like Icarus, he flew too near the sun. But he'd been plummeting to earth for years, and landings are often rocky.

Brian stood now, wings no longer hefting him aloft. Grounded. No longer a god. Dusty would say, 'not even a lesser one'. Only a man. Fallible. Fragile. Vulnerable. Hurting but still loved, and maybe just a step or two closer to getting it right. 

He placed his hand on the back of Justin's neck, giving it a squeeze. Drew him near. Whispered. “Let's go home, Sunshine.”

Justin looked up into those hazel eyes. Eyes still hinting of angst. Still encumbered by a painful past. He smiled and wrapped his arm around Brian's waist. They needed to find a way to capture those missed steps. They'd get there. Somehow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story has been an exercise in trying to understand Brian and Justin's split-personality displays in the final episodes of this series. Don't know if I've accomplished that, but in Brian's words, did the best I could. 
> 
> I've struggled through this conclusion and it has been redone and rewritten more times than the Bible. Let me know if I've succeeded at my goal, even if only a little.

**Author's Note:**

> *Title adapted from a Camille Paglia quote regarding Babylon.


End file.
